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2015-02-28

VA empire strikes back — bureaucrats vs. veterans’ health

Vatic Note: I truly believe this is all planned and part of the attack on our military readiness, by demoralizing the troops, so we would lose WW III. We did a whole blog on the issue of military readiness and it included this treatment of our troops b y the VA. In my entire life, I have never seen our troops treated so badly as I have since 9-11. I won't go into again, but suffice it to say that troops have been treated as if they were the enemy instead of the countries fighting us. If this below does not make you mad, then you are not paying attention. No way should we fight a world war for these greedy satanic bankers.

Its not up to the troops to decide what wars we are to fight, but they are our children and they answer to the call to protect their homeland, their families, neighbors, relatives, etc. And in return we do this below, added to charging our wounded soldiers for their meals while they are in the hospital. Now what kind of support is that? As I said, I won't go into it all, rather I suggest you read the blog we did on this subject.

President Obama and the Veterans Administration bureaucracy are already sabotaging the VA-reform law passed in August.

The ink is barely dry on the 8.6 million “Choice Cards” that
supposedly allow vets to see a doctor outside the delay-plagued VA
system. But Obama’s budget tries to snatch the $10 billion allocated for
choice and let VA top administrators spend it however they want. It’s a
sickening betrayal.

Even worse, VA Secretary Robert McDonald is telling federal lawmakers
that this underhanded move will better serve “VA system priorities.”

That’s the problem. He’s more interested in protecting “the system”
than the vets. It’s all about bureaucratic turf and the interests served
by the failed status quo.

With a straight face, McDonald says it has “nothing to do with us
trying to gut the Choice Card or anything like that, it was about
flexibility.” Flexibility for VA bureaucrats, not for ailing vets who
need it.

Removing the funding definitely will gut the program, because the law says the Choice program expires whenever funding runs out.

At a Feb. 2 press briefing, VA administrators claimed without even a
smirk that sick vets don’t want to see outside physicians, and that use
of the Choice Cards was “much lower” than expected.

That’s a whopper. When asked, they couldn’t provide any specifics.

Pete Hegseth, the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, can. He
reports that vets get the run around when they call the VA for
permission to use the Choice Card. “The VA is making a concerted attempt
to undermine anything that looks like choice.”

Vets get told they don’t meet the requirement for living 40 miles or
more from a VA facility, or they haven’t endured an unacceptably long
wait for care or their care isn’t medically necessary.

VA administrators are lying to Congress when they say vets don’t want
choice. In a Tarrance Group poll the first week of February, 88 percent
of vets said it is “extremely” or “very important” to increase their
health-care choices.

Another whopper: The president’s budget parrots the VA’s claim that
the money allocated for Choice is urgently needed to “support essential
investments in VA system priorities.”

How urgent are those priorities? At their press briefing, the VA brass couldn’t name them.

House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.)
dismisses the notion that the Choice money is needed elsewhere, pointing
out that the VA has “left hundreds of millions in health-care funding
unspent since 2010 while thousands of vets languished on waiting lists.”

Not to mention that the president’s new budget proposes increasing VA funding by another 7.5 percent.

“It’s not about money,” says Hegseth. “The VA wants to perpetuate its
dysfunctional system” by keeping vets from choosing to go elsewhere for
care.

The shenanigans against Choice are one sign that little progress has
been made at the VA since the celebrated enactment of the Veterans
Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014. The politicians took
their bows, then the VA administrators got busy dismantling the reforms
before they could succeed.

Too bad lives are at stake. On Feb. 12, President Obama signed into
law a veterans-suicide prevention act named after Clay Hunt, a Marine
who’d served in Iraq and later killed himself. It passed Congress
unanimously. Too bad no lawmakers asked whether it has any chance of
succeeding.
The answer is: probably not.

The law says VA suicide-prevention programs will get outside
evaluations. So what? The VA has been inspected ad nauseum by the
General Accountability Office, Inspectors General and other auditors.

The reports pile up, unread, and the VA’s dysfunction lives on.
Indeed, the GAO — unimpressed with the reform promises of the new VA
secretary — just named the entire Veterans Administration a “high risk”
program.

What’s needed is a system that puts vets in the driver’s seat,
letting them take their medical-care funding wherever they choose. On
Feb. 26, a bipartisan task force assembled by Concerned Veterans for
America will unveil such a plan. It’s already attracting support of
powerful lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif), and Miller.

With the VA leadership and unions lined up against them, they have their work cut out for them.

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